How to auto generate a unique meta description?

[DanDeceuster]

The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in:

<title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title>

In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect.

How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:

[seoninja20]

I just did a large 5k page website with the same kind of auto generation, It worked very well. I'm not sure how your website is setup and if the content is all on the database but ours is and we just had to fill in some variables like this.

<title><?=ucfirst($ctar[county_name]);?> Jail, <?=$star[state_name];?> | Bail Bonds & Lawyer Resources</title>

Most likely you are looking for something like strip tags.

http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/285226

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

[ShaMenz]

Hi Daniel,

The first thing you need to do is to find the definition of the container that “this” is built out of and then add an element called metaDescription.

This will create an empty string until you populate it elsewhere.

Now where you want metaDescription shown, you just use

<title><?= $this->metaDescription ?></title> (replace metaTag with metaDescription).

Next, you need to search your code for the place where metaTag is assigned and add an assignment for metaDescription which can be whatever you want it to be ie a substring etc.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[DanDeceuster]

This worked like a charm! The site is on something called Zend cart I think and I had to sort through several Controllers but eventually found all the metaTag stuff in there and added a metaDesc variable next to them, unique meta descriptions on every page! Thanks!

[ShaMenz]

Perfect!

Glad to hear it's all fixed